She Is Everything

The office is empty this time of day, when everyone goes to lunch and the phones go straight to voicemail. She is still here, however. She eats a peanut butter and honey sandwich at this hour every day from behind her executive desk. She'd acquired this job a few years ago, and how she'd acquired it, well that'd been the speculation of her employees ever since, but they didn't know the truth, and it never bothered her much. She was more powerful than they could ever imagine, and their petty gossip was nothing for her to bat an eyelash over.

The only other person who is here is her receptionist, who buzzes her.

"What is it? I'm trying to enjoy my lunch." she asks.

"I'm sorry. I tried to tell him not to come up, but he went anyway."

She frowns. "That's fine."

The door opens aggressively and hits the wall behind it. She doesn't need to ask who he is, because she already knows him. A man, in perhaps his forties, storms in, staring straight at her. She stares back, unyielding As he approaches her desk, his pace slows, his eyes cold and focused. He drops something onto her desk. She casually glances down at the pile of photos strewn across the shiny wood surface. In each one, she sees herself. He jabs the first picture with his index finger, "This picture was taken in Munich, in the year 1901."

She says nothing, so he moves to the second, "This one was taken in Manhattan, 1920."

Then he pokes the third image. "Paris, 1935"

The fourth. "West Berlin, 1944."

The fifth. "Brussels, 1956."

And the last one. "Rome, 1973."

She nods, giving him an impressed expression and says, "You've done your homework."

"How is it that you are in all of these? I researched you, and despite the fact that you are the executive director of this company, there is no information on you at all, anywhere. No telephone, no residence, no date of birth or background at all. No obituaries, no social media, not even an email with your name in it. You exist but it's as if no one has even heard of you. It took me months to even find you, and suddenly you show up in all of these old photos, looking exactly as you do right now, standing here in front of me. "

She shrugs. "I prefer to keep to myself, and I age well if I don't say so myself."

"Stop the banter. You need to explain this," he demands.

She leans back in her leather chair, saying cooly, "I don't need to do anything, sir. As a matter of fact."

He clears his throat, his voice trembling. "I will expose you. I will stop at nothing to make sure these photos are seen by the world. My brother works for CNN and if I don't get an explanation, I'll..."

"Lying won't get you anywhere with me. I can smell a lie the same way a vulture can smell a corpse on an Arizona highway. Your brother is a car salesman with a drinking problem and you're a conspiracy theorist whose only connection with the media is when you submitted pictures of UFOs to the National Inquirer and made $30, which you spent at an AppleBees with your estranged wife, Lauren.

In reality, those 'UFOs' were most likely a helicopter with an added disco ball. Sounds crazy but it makes more sense than the idea that a higher lifeform would choose to take a tourist stop here on our sad, little polluted planet and anyone with a fourth grade education can debunk your evidence against me, and if you fight me I will make you disappear, and nobody will ever know to look for you."

He blinks at the woman and reaches to collect the photos, but just as his fingers graze the first one, the photos burst into focused, individual flames, and within seconds, they are gone. There are no burnt spots, no ashes. The table is cold to the touch.

"What the hell are you?" he exclaims, his voice sounding hoarse.

"That's simple. I am Everything."

And with her mind, or whatever lay beneath her skin-like shell, who she really was, willed him to be gone, and so he was.

There will never be any way to know how the man died, because there will never be any way to know how the man lived. There was never a body, or a sound, or a weapon that anyone knew of, and no one knew who the strange man was or where he had gone that fateful day that he experienced Everything.

Everything has a way to win.